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Yoga Thought Meets Modern Birth

pregnant woman meditating outdoorswith Suzanne Arms, Birth Educator, Author & Filmmaker

This is a live, interactive, on-line course. The class applies towards the philosophy requirements of Yoga Garden SF’s 85-hour Prenatal Teacher Training certificate program, and is open to the public.
Ms. Arms discusses with students some of the following topics:
  • How yoga can help modern parents and families, starting with how they think about and behave, and the decisions they make, about conception, pregnancy, bonding and baby care and parenting
  • Yoga and Eastern philosophy and practices as the most important addition to birth education ever
  • What the new sciences of cell biology and epigenetics (the impact of environment upon our genes and how our genes express themselves) show us that underscores the value of yoga in modern life
  • The role of yoga in helping childbearing women lower their level of stress, anxiety and fear of birth and parenting and helping them raise their levels of confidence and trust in their body and their baby and the biological process
  • How understanding that there is no distinction between mind and body, and that the body is the temple of the soul and spirit can transform prospective parents’ understanding of the nature of what it means to be human and what it means to bring a human being into the world
  • How learning to fully activate parts of the body while relaxing and releasing tension in other parts at the same time can help women and men in the physically and emotionally challenging aspects of pregnancy, birth and caring for a baby
  • The ability of yoga-based principles to assist and support women and men who are birthing in a fear and intervention-based hospital environment (or artificially-assisted conception, etc) and then come home and find themselves lacking the physical presence and support of a community

Cost of the class is $65. This class is also included in the tuition of the Prenatal Teacher Training.

Register Here

Required reading list for this class:

Immaculate Deception II, by Suzanne Arms (published by Celestial Arts, Berkeley, CA) in either the 1994 version (with the blue cover of a baby on its back in water), or the 1997 edition, which is slightly updated but lacks the color photo section ( cream-colored cover with the mother lying on her bed in a bathrobe and her very young baby on her abdomen). This book is the very best at providing a broad overview of most of the issues related to birth and the primal period, including birth in traditional cultures, midwifery, fear and pain, breastfeeding, bonding, fathering, circumcision and many more. It looks at the subject from a variety of perspectives – social, psychological, physiological, ecological, spiritual, etc.

Gentle Birth Gentle Mothering by Sarah Buckley MD. This book is the very best at describing the hormonal dimensions of pregnancy, labor and birth, breastfeeding and bonding and translating the science into lay person´s terms.

You may find both of these books used on Half.com, or from Amazon or in Yoga Garden SF’s bookstore.